First Photo of Earth from Space
- From: johnscheldroup@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:59:07 -0800 (PST)
I happen to be looking around for the earliest images ever taken of
the Earth, and believe it or not these
were snapped by captured V2 rockets back in Oct, 1946 at White Sands
Missile Range.
In the archive file below presented by Air & Space I caught an
interesting comment made from then camera engineer Clyde Holliday (JH
Physics Laboratory) in 1950 for National Geographic. He was certainly
part of the team that made up the White Sands Missile Range testing of
V2 rocket experiments that would have fit the
time frame of July 07, 1947 or the time of hypo-incident crash of an
extraterrestrial spacecraft in Roswell NM.
I found then found a related adobe file written for JAMES ALFRED VAN
ALLEN that somewhat corroborates
the timeline of those V2 rocket high altitude launches, dates ranging
from around July, 47. I am curious as to why an engineer employed by
an institution like John's Hopkins Applied Physics under contract for
the Army
would then have made such comments to a National Geographic ??
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/FEATURE-FirstPhoto.html
Before 1946, the highest pictures ever taken of the Earth’s surface
were from the Explorer II balloon,
which had ascended 13.7 miles in 1935, high enough to discern the
curvature of the Earth. The V-2
cameras reached more than five times that altitude, where they clearly
showed the planet set against
the blackness of space. When the movie frames were stitched together,
the panoramas taken in the late
1940s covered a million square miles or more at a single glance.
As Clyde Holliday, the engineer who developed the camera, wrote in
National Geographic in 1950,
the V-2 photos showed for the first time "how our Earth would look to
visitors from another planet
coming in on a space ship."
http://www.astronautix.com/sites/whisands.htm
1946 January 16 - Launch Vehicle: V-2. V-2 flight tests in US
initiated. U.S. upper atmosphere
research program initiated with captured German V-2 rockets. A V-2
panel of representatives of
various interested agencies was created, and a total of more than 60
V-2's were fired before the
supply ran out. The Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins
University then undertook to
develop a medium-altitude rocket, the Aerobee, while the Naval
Research Laboratory (NRL)
directed its efforts to the development of a large high-altitude
rocket, first called the Neptune,
later the Viking.
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/van90/VanAllenBio_LudwigOct2004.pdf
JAMES ALFRED VAN ALLEN
FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO THE BEGINNING OF THE SPACE ERA
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
George H. Ludwig
Prepared for Van Allen’s
90th Birthday Celebration
At the University of Iowa
9 October 2004
The V-2 and Aerobee Programs at the Applied Physics Laboratory
At the conclusion of the war, Van Allen had a number of discussions
with Tuve about his interest in
resuming peacetime research. They led to Van Allen’s return to the APL
in late 1945. Upon his arrival,
he organized the High Altitude Research Group with a talented group of
researchers including Lawrence
W. Fraser, Clyde Holliday, John Hopfield, Robert Peterson, Howard
Tatel, and several others. He supervised
this group from its formation in 1946 until his departure from APL in
late 1950.
Not long after his return to APL, he was told by staff member Henry H.
Porter about the Army Ordnance Department’s plans for using captured
German V-2 rockets for high altitude research. On 16 January 1946,
he met with a group of scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory
(NRL). This meeting was an outgrowth
of ongoing internal NRL discussions to decide upon a major post-war
research topic.
Acting upon the suggestion of NRL’s Milton W. Rosen, Ernest H.
Krause’s Communications Security
Section decided to apply its wartime experience with missiles and
communications to the study of the
upper atmosphere. This was approved by NRL’s director in December
1945, and the section’s name was
changed to the Rocket Sonde Research Section. Interestingly, this
group’s initial period of self-education
in the needs, techniques, and nuances of upper atmospheric research
included discussions about the
use of artificial Earth satellites.
Homer Newell gave several lectures dealing with that possibility.
However, that objective was set aside
then because of its expected high cost and the long time required to
reach it. The NRL group concluded
that their initial efforts needed to be concentrated on more immediate
results. At APL, Van Allen’s group
soon developed plans for a comprehensive program to measure the
primary cosmic rays, solar ultraviolet spectrum, geomagnetic field in
the ionosphere, and the altitude distribution of ozone in the upper
atmosphere. Thus, both APL and NRL concurrently formulated somewhat
similar programs. They quickly became both collaborators and
competitors.
In addition to the areas just mentioned, magnetic field measurements
well above the Earth’s surface
were of considerable interest. The APL group maintained a close
collaboration with Ernest H. Vestine at
the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and with Allen Maxwell at the
Naval Ordnance Laboratory to
develop flux-gate magnetometers to make these measurements.
Additionally, there was an interest in
optical and infrared imaging from the high atmosphere for the study of
atmospheric conditions and
patterns, and Clyde T. Holliday of the APL group undertook the
development of recoverable cameras for
that purpose.
One of the important outcomes of the January 1946 meeting between the
APL and NRL staffs was the
formation of an unofficial group of scientists that initially called
itself the “V-2 Rocket Panel.” This
name was soon changed to the “V-2 Upper Atmosphere Panel.” It began
its work immediately, holding
its first formal meeting on 27 January 1946 with Krause as its
energetic and effective first chairman. The
group’s initial role was to help plan for the effective utilization of
the V-2 flights for research. Because
of Van Allen’s strong interest in high-altitude research, his
experience with rockets, and his familiarity
with very rugged miniature vacuum tubes and circuitry, he was included
as a valued charter member of
that Panel.
When Krause left for industry in December 1947, Van Allen was elected
to chair the group. He
continued as its chairman throughout the rest of its lifetime (through
additional name changes to the
“V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Panel” in September 1946, the “Upper
Atmosphere Rocket Research
Panel” in March 1948, and the “Rocket and Satellite Research Panel in
April 1957”). When the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed on 1 October
1958, some of the Panel’s
functions were taken over by that new agency, and the Space Science
Board of the National Academy of
Sciences assumed others. Nevertheless, the Panel continued for several
additional years as sponsor of a
series of colloquia. It finally simply quit operating in 1960, and
turned its files over to the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. A full set of the minutes
and other records of the group
was retained by Van Allen, and is now available as a part of the James
A. Van Allen Special Collection at
the University of Iowa Library Archives.
This group is emphasized here because of its tremendous importance in
overseeing the selection of
experiments for rocket and satellite flights from 1946 until after
NASA was formed in 1958, and in
recognition of Van Allen’s pivotal role in the conduct of its work.
The program for American scientists to provide instruments for the V-2
program was initially
envisioned as a very short program of only five-month’s duration,
encompassing about 25 launches. It
was later extended, in both duration and number of launches, to
encompass the flights of a substantial
number of instruments prepared by Van Allen and many others. At the
same time the flights were being
made, the scientists recognized that they would need a launch vehicle
to continue their high-altitude
scientific research after the V-2 program ended. The Upper Atmosphere
Research Panel served as the
focal point for efforts to meet that need. Merle Tuve and Henry Porter
at APL suggested that a follow-up
development take place, and Van Allen, from his position as head of
the APL High Altitude Research
Group, undertook a survey of U.S. efforts that might result in
suitable rockets for high-altitude research.
He was greatly assisted in this study by Rolf Sabersky of what had by
then become the Aerojet
Engineering Corporation, a company spawned by the west coast Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
Concurrently, a similar interest was unfolding at NRL. These two
endeavors led to a rocket development
proposal from Aerojet, followed by contracts in early 1947 with
Aerojet and the Douglas Aircraft Company.
Van Allen provided technical supervision, serving as the agent of the
Navy’s Bureau of Ordinance that
provided the financial support for the work. The outcome of this
contract was the Aerobee sounding rocket.
The Aerobee achieved a remarkable record in U.S. suborbital high-
altitude research.7 Its initial test
firing occurred on 25 September 1947, followed quickly by the first
successful launch of an instrumented
payload on 24 November 1947. By 1951, thirty Aerobees had been
launched, and during the ten-year
period from September 1947 to September 1957, 165 Aerobees were
launched from the Army’s White
Sands Proving Ground, the Air Force’s nearby Holloman Air Development
Center, Fort Churchill in
Manitoba, Canada, and from shipboard at sea. As of 17 January 1985, a
total of 1037 Aerobees had been
fired for a wide variety of investigations in atmospheric physics,
cosmic rays, geomagnetism, astronomy,
and other fields. Most of the successful Aerobee research flights
achieved peak altitudes between 40 and
65 miles, depending on payload weight and other factors. The record
height of over 91 miles was
achieved by U.S. Air Force flight number 56 on 15 June 1955.
Returning to the early research program in Van Allen’s High Altitude
Research Group; with some
urging by Harry Vestine, a student of Sydney Chapman at Oxford
University, Van Allen’s group
undertook a search for the equatorial electrojet in 1947. This
phenomenon had been inferred by Chapman
and Julius Bartels at Oxford from ground-based magnetometer records. A
three-axis fluxgate
magnetometer of a type in use at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory looked
promising for this work, and
Van Allen, S. Fred Singer, and Lawrence Fraser adapted it for flight
in the Aerobee rockets. The first
flight trial of this instrument was made at the White Sands Proving
Ground in New Mexico on 13 April
1948, where the rocket soared to a height of 70 miles. The
magnetometer obtained good measurements
throughout the flight, thus validating the instrument design,
although, of course, the electrojet was not
observable that far north.
With this successful test, a major field expedition was undertaken the
following year. It culminated
in March 1949 in the launch of three Aerobees near the magnetic
equator off the coast of Peru from the
deck of the USS Norton Sound. This expedition achieved a number of
important firsts. It provided the
first U.S. flights of high-altitude sounding rockets at any location
other than White Sands. It was the first
launch from shipboard, thus paving the way for numerous ship-based
sounding rocket and rockoon flights
over the next decade. On one of the early flights, the magnetometer
yielded the signature of at least a
partial penetration of the electrojet in the altitude range 58 to 65
miles.8
Van Allen’s tenure at the Applied Physics Laboratory from 1946 to 1951
covered a highly productive
period.The work of that laboratory was an important component of a
larger national effort in high
altitude research which, over the years, made substantial advances in
understanding atmospheric
structure, ionospheric physics, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, the
ultraviolet and x-ray spectra of the sun,
and in high altitude photography of cloud cover and the Earth’s
surface. This extensive effort included
the development of rockets, instruments, methodologies, and
organizational structures for high altitude
research that served as the foundation for the movement into space
during the decade of the 1950’s.
Fundamental changes began to occur within the Applied Physics
Laboratory in 1950 when R. C.
Gibson replaced Merle Tuve as its director. Among other things, Van
Allen was asked to pick up
supervision of the residual proximity fuse work in addition to his
group’s work in high altitude research.
He accepted this task, but interpreted it as foreshadowing a decrease
in emphasis on high altitude
research, and a shifting away from the freewheeling spirit that had
marked their work up to that time. He
began to ponder his future prospects for productive research in his
chosen field of interest within that
organization.
By this point in his career, Van Allen had established an
international reputation in upper-atmospheric
physics research. His background became especially important as the
space program slowly began to
take shape, and Van Allen’s name appeared with increasing frequency
during its early planning. It is
notable that, throughout his period at APL, Van Allen was able to
combine responsibility for a broad span
of supervisory and managerial duties with his personal research, a
valuable and remarkably rare ability
that he was to continue throughout his professional career.
.
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